General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Bells Are Ringing

Bells Are Ringing is a musical comedy with a book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Jule Styne, about Ella Peterson, a telephone answering-service operator who becomes entangled in her clients' lives. It opened on Broadway at the Shubert Theatre on November 29, 1956, produced by The Theatre Guild, and ran 924 performances before closing on March 7, 1959.¹ In 1960 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released a film version directed by Vincente Minnelli, with Judy Holliday repeating her stage role opposite Dean Martin.²

Key fact	Detail
Broadway run	Opened November 29, 1956 at the Shubert Theatre; transferred to the Alvin Theatre on December 15, 1958; closed March 7, 1959 after 924 performances¹
Creators	Book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green; music by Jule Styne; produced by The Theatre Guild¹
Original stars	Judy Holliday (Ella Peterson) and Sydney Chaplin; Holliday won the 1957 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical³
1960 film	MGM, directed by Vincente Minnelli, produced by Arthur Freed; Dean Martin replaced Chaplin; 126-127 minutes in CinemaScope and Metrocolor²
Film recognition	Academy Award nomination for Best Music (Scoring of a Musical Picture), lost to Song Without End⁴
Holliday's last film	Her final screen appearance; she died of cancer in 1965 at age 43⁴
Revival	2001 Broadway revival at the Plymouth Theatre, opening April 12, 2001, 68 performances, starring Faith Prince⁵

Spoilers

Plot

Ella Peterson works the switchboard at Susanswerphone, a telephone answering service run by her cousin Sue from a Brooklyn Heights basement apartment. Ordered only to take and give messages, Ella instead adopts a variety of character voices to help subscribers, including the playwright Jeffrey Moss, who knows her only as "Mom" and imagines her as a little old lady.²^•⁷ A police inspector suspects the service is a front for prostitution, while Sue's boyfriend J. Otto Prantz actually uses the service as a front for a bookmaking operation that encodes bets as classical-music record orders.² After Ella exposes the bookmaking ring and Jeffrey discovers that "Mom" and the woman he loves are the same person, the two dance out together as the service's bells keep ringing.²

The Broadway musical

Comden and Green wrote the show as a vehicle for their friend Judy Holliday, with whom they had performed in the Greenwich Village cabaret act The Revuers in the 1940s. The script describes the heroine, Ella Peterson, as "pretty, warm, sympathetic...with a quick mind and vivid imagination," an idealized version of Holliday herself.⁴ Holliday played Ella for two years and won the 1957 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical; Sydney Chaplin, her co-star, also won a Tony.³^•⁴ The original cast also included Jean Stapleton, Bernie West, and Dort Clark.⁵

The score includes "Just in Time," "The Party's Over," "Long Before I Knew You," and "Better Than a Dream," with lyrics by Comden and Green and music by Styne.⁶ A London stage version opened on November 14, 1957, starring Janet Blair.²

The 1960 film

MGM purchased the rights to the musical in 1957 and planned for Holliday to reprise her stage role.² Sydney Chaplin was tested for the picture, but Dean Martin was chosen as Holliday's co-star instead.² Producer Arthur Freed and director Vincente Minnelli retained most of the Broadway cast, including Jean Stapleton as Ella's cousin Sue.⁴ The film was shot in CinemaScope and Metrocolor, with music adapted and conducted by André Previn, cinematography by Milton Krasner, and editing by Adrienne Fazan; portions were filmed on location in New York City, including Times Square and Bay Ridge, and in Los Angeles.²

The production was difficult for Holliday. She was unhappy with the script, nervous about returning to the screen after four years, and struggled to rework a stage role she had played for 924 performances; by the end of the first week of shooting she asked to be released from the film, and Freed refused. Her anxiety produced crying jags and a series of illnesses and injuries that delayed production. Her new boyfriend, jazz musician Gerry Mulligan, calmed her somewhat and appeared in the film as Ella's blind date.⁴

The film premiered at Radio City Music Hall to large crowds and better reviews than the stage show had received, breaking Music Hall records by grossing over a million dollars in a seven-week run. Elsewhere it underperformed, and it was Minnelli's least profitable film since The Pirate (1948).⁴ It received an Academy Award nomination for Best Music (Scoring of a Musical Picture) but lost to Song Without End.⁴

Reception and later history

Contemporary American criticism was mixed. The New Yorker found little to praise in the film beyond "a jolly performance by Judy Holliday, who can hold her own in any comic league," describing the picture as the stage musical "transposed almost intact to the screen."⁸ A 2019 scholarly chapter by Martha Shearer, a film studies researcher at King's College London, notes that the film is usually praised for retaining Holliday from the Broadway production but criticized for not achieving an imaginative cinematic rendering.⁹

The film was Holliday's last. During filming, most of the production believed her illnesses were psychosomatic, but within a year she was diagnosed with the cancer that killed her in 1965 at age 43.⁴ The musical returned to Broadway in 2001 in a revival at the Plymouth Theatre directed by Tina Landau, starring Faith Prince and Marc Kudisch, which ran 68 performances and received Tony Award nominations including Best Revival of a Musical.⁵^•⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Musical and music films (individual works) › Musical films of the 1930s to 1960s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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